Quote:
Originally Posted by kuromitsu
Tsuiokuhen lives and breathes tragedy, which is okay I suppose, if someone is into that - but to me it's cold and impersonal. In the manga you can see traces of the later Kenshin in the Battousai, you can see Tomoe slowly starting to unfrost, etc. To me, this human touch makes the story work. In the anime they're basically two emotionally dead people being emotionally dead together and it's supposedly sad.
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THIS. I don't mind the tone of the OVAs, but they ultimately lacked the joy in the human experience. Kenshin's flashback was entirely comprised of despair. I guess it works in the sense that two broken people can often form a bond through their mutual sadness, but... that's not how I saw their relationship.
It ultimately makes me consider Kenshin's later decisions and actions to be incredibly misguided. I don't see Kenshin in the OVAs as ever having
loved Tomoe; she became someone who satiated his loneliness. It was like a Misato-Kaji romance.
To be honest, I'm not sure if it's just Okada's fault though. This realistic style is characteristic of the director, Kazuhiro Furuhashi. If you pay attention to his other works and other adaptations of manga, you'll start to notice how they're often different from what their authors conceived. This doesn't necessarily mean that he's a bad director--he does his job well. But his changes occasionally come across as a lack of respect for an author's intent.